National Affairs: Acceptance Speech

Days before the convention opened, the squire from Libertyville took up his pencil and began to scribble out a draft of his acceptance address. He got scores of unsolicited suggestions and memos. After reading them, he tossed them aside and continued on his own. All last week, even during intervals in the hectic Truman crisis, he returned time and again to the isolation of his small, green-tinted law office on Chicago’s South La Salle Street. There, shirt-sleeved and with tie askew, he revised, updated, rephrased and polished. On the convention’s last night Adlai Stevenson stood up before the Democratic delegates as their second-time standard bearer, accepted the nomination in a fighting speech studded with epigrams and clearly wrought phrases that brought applause from his audience 53 times.

Stevenson’s theme was the need of the Democratic Party to move beyond the New and Fair Deals and face up to the realities of a “new America”− a theme he frequently clouded with catchwords from his party’s past. There was high praise for Eleanor Roosevelt, who “reminded us so movingly that this is 1956 and not 1932; not even 1952; that our problems alter as well as their solutions; that change is the law of life, and that political parties ignore it at their peril.” There was also a nod to Harry Truman, the spirit of ’48: “I am glad to have you on my side again, sir.”

Borrowed Thunderbolts. With thunderbolts from Carlyle and Woodrow Wilson he blasted the Republicans from stem to stern. He did not propose, he said, to make “political capital out of the President’s illness.” But he attacked Eisenhower as a weak President “cynically coveted [by the Republicans] as a candidate but ignored as a leader.” In an oblique thrust at Nixon, he said that if he and Kefauver are elected “and it is God’s will that I do not serve my full four years, the people will have a new President they can trust.”

The men surrounding Ike, said Stevenson, have dealt “the ultimate indignity to the democratic process”: they seek to “merchandise candidates like breakfast cereal.” The result: “No Administration has ever before enjoyed such uncritical and enthusiastic support.” But has it used this opportunity “to elevate us? To enlighten us? To inspire us?” The delegates answered with thunderous “noes.” The truth, he declared, is that not everybody at home is prosperous and that, despite what the President has said, our prestige abroad “has probably never been lower,” and “we are losing the cold war.”

Borrowed Terms. For one thing he was grateful, he said with irony. By a “minor miracle” the Republicans, “after twenty years of incessant damnation of the New Deal,” have finally “swallowed it, or most of it, and it looks as though they could keep it down at least until after election.” What, if elected, would Stevenson do? He seemed to be of two minds, one of them wearing an oldtime hat. Under his leadership there would be stronger labor unions and more federal support for farmers, small businesses, power and water development, etc.

The broader answer was contained in the “terms” on which he accepted the nomination. History, he said, “has brought us to the threshold of a new America−to the America of the great ideals and noble visions which are the stuff our future must be made of. I mean a new America where poverty is abolished and our abundance is used to enrich the lives of every family. I mean a new America where freedom is made real for all without regard to race or belief or economic condition. I mean a new America which everlastingly attacks the ancient idea that men can solve their differences by killing each other.”

Few could quarrel with that. If the Eisenhower Administration had swallowed the New Deal, the Adlai Stevenson of 1956, in stating his “terms,” had also swallowed a lot of the Eisenhower Administration.